Paul the bouncer was in the process of disarming one guy who was far bigger and younger than he was. As Puller watched, Paul whipped the guy around, clamped two hands around his neck, and jerked to the right. Puller could imagine the neck snapping cleanly in two with the move.
The man died without making a sound. Paul let him go and the man slumped to the floor.
Puller stepped into the doorway, pointed his gun, and fired two rounds crisply at the man who had his gun pointed at the bouncer’s head. The man caught both rounds in the torso and fell forward, as dead as the other guy, only with a lot more blood.
Rogers stared over at Puller and then turned to see the dead guy, his gun still in hand.
Puller called out, “Any others?”
Rogers shook his head. “Don’t think so. Four in here and three outside.”
Another shot rang out a moment later. Puller whipped his gun in the direction. Rogers ducked down and looked that way too.
A man fell forward, the pistol still clenched in his hand.
Behind him was Suzanne Davis. She lowered the gun she’d just used to kill the man.
Rogers slowly rose.
“You owe me,” said Davis.
“Yes, I do,” said Rogers. He jerked a thumb at Puller. “I owe him too.”
Puller kept his weapon out and looked around at the others. They were young, drunk, puking, crying, some bawling. All on the floor, the living shit scared out of all of them.
Only he, Davis, and Rogers were standing.
“I’m Suzanne Davis.”
Puller nodded and introduced himself. “You handle your weapon well.”
Puller suddenly saw a flash of movement behind the bar and swung his gun that way.
Helen Myers emerged from under the bar, shaky and pale.
Puller lowered his weapon.
They could all hear the sirens now.
“What the hell happened?” said Puller.
Myers came around the corner of the bar. “These men came here…” She looked down at the body of the big man with the white hair.
“That’s Karl,” she mumbled. “He’s my head of security. Was my head of security.” She fell silent and covered her face with her hands.
Puller looked over at Rogers questioningly as Davis came to stand next to him. She put the gun away in her purse and slung it over her shoulder.
Rogers touched the body of one dead man with his foot. “These guys were professionals.”
Puller had already come to the same conclusion.
“And Karl?”
Rogers cocked his head and listened intently as the sirens drew closer. He looked back at Puller, the muscles tight around his neck. “Two of these guys burst in with Karl between them. I went to help him and they shot him right in front of me.”
Myers said, “Karl called. He was coming in late tonight. I think…I think he must have run into these guys maybe in the parking lot. Maybe he tried to stop them.”
“Wrong place, wrong time,” commented Davis.
Rogers looked at her. “Where’d you learn to shoot?”
“Same place you learned to fight, school of hard knocks.”
Rogers nodded, his eyes once more looking over Puller’s shoulder, in the direction of the sirens.
Puller slowly lowered his weapon. “So you took out…six armed men with just your hands?” he asked Rogers.
“I got lucky.”
Puller looked at Rogers’s arm. “You’re bleeding.”
Rogers didn’t even look at the wound. “It’s fine.”
The door from the upstairs room opened and Josh Quentin cautiously peered out, his face ashen. “Is it…is it over?”
Puller looked up at him and then saw the women crowding in behind, all looking disoriented.
“Who are you?” asked Puller, though he knew the answer.
Myers answered. “That’s Josh Quentin, a customer.”
“You better get down here,” said Puller. “The police will want to talk to all of you.”
“Oh, shit, the police?” said Quentin.
Rogers looked over at Davis in time to see her do an eye roll at Quentin’s comment.
Outside, Puller heard the racking of automatic weapons, and the thick pounding of combat boots on pavement. He put his gun away before the cops accidentally shot him. He moved toward the door to face them.
The lead assaulter poked his shielded head around the edge of the door.
Puller had his badge out and loudly identified himself. “We’ve got wounded people outside and in here. You’re going to need multiple ambulances.”
The assault team, ten strong, swept into the room and quickly secured it. Josh Quentin and his group, once drunk, now stone cold sober, were quickly escorted downstairs.
Those not wounded were sequestered and the initial interview process begun. The dead were identified by IDs in their wallets and purses. The shriek of ambulance sirens filtered into the bar.
The team turned to triage as they moved among the wounded, while others checked that the shooters really were dead and that there were no more of them lurking around.
Puller helped with this, and when the ambulances arrived he assisted in lifting the wounded onto gurneys and then into the waiting rescue vehicles.
Homicide detectives showed up about twenty minutes later and started to officially process the scene. Puller offered to help, but they politely declined.
Sitting on a stool at the bar, he also provided as much information as he could about what had happened.
The detective said, “There’s no ID on any of these guys. They look Eastern European if you ask me. I’ve looked at some of their weapons and the serial numbers have been professionally removed. These guys are pros. Some kind of criminal hit team.”
“Why would a professional hit team from Eastern Europe attack a bar?”
The detective shrugged. “Right now, I couldn’t tell you. Maybe because it’s a military hangout?”
Puller leaned back in his barstool and stared off, thinking about this.
The detective’s words brought him out of these thoughts. “I guess it was lucky you were here, Agent Puller.”
“I really didn’t do that much. The guy you really want to talk to is—”
Puller looked around the room for Rogers.
The man had disappeared.
Puller looked over at Josh Quentin and his party. And then at Helen Myers, who was being questioned by another detective.
And Davis was nowhere to be seen.
“What was that?” said the detective, who had been distracted by his partner’s calling out to him about a piece of bagged evidence.
Puller said slowly, “It was nothing. It’ll keep.”
He walked over to the bodies of the men inside the bar. The ME was examining one of them.
Puller showed her his badge and said, “You got a cause of death yet?”
The woman nodded and pointed to the two men lying next to the one she was examining. “The guy on the left has a crushed carotid. The guy on the right has a fractured windpipe. The guy over there had his skull cracked.”
Puller considered this and said, “The shooters outside?”
“Same sort of crushing injuries. Don’t know what sort of weapon was used.”
“I don’t think you’re going to find a weapon,” said Puller.
“Why’s that?” she asked.
Because the weapon is gone, thought Puller.
Chapter
46
SHIT.
Rogers slammed the white van into gear and drove off.
Luckily he had parked well away from the bar, and thus outside the perimeter the police had set up. He had managed to slip out the back of the bar before the police could get there.
Cops everywhere. People who had seen what he had done. Bodies all over the place. And the tall guy who had saved his ass?
John Puller. Army CID. Military cop.
Had his appearance merely been a coincidence, o
r had he fed Rogers a bunch of crap?
Yet Puller had saved his life.
Rogers wanted to go back and find out exactly who John Puller was and what he was doing here. Yet as more sirens filled the air he decided retreat was the better choice. He punched the gas and drove on.
He got to the motel, packed his few things, carried them out to the van, and drove off. His heart was racing so fast he thought it might explode.
He traced the scar on his head, pushing down hard where the thing was. He looked at his arm where he’d been wounded.
He’d lied to Puller. It was a bullet wound, not a blade. But it was in and out. He could feel no pain and he noted that it was already starting to heal.
He rubbed the thing in his head. He hated it, but he loved it for the things it could do like that.
I’m a science-fiction freak.
But with billions of dollars to burn through, even science fiction could become reality, however fleetingly, and with all sorts of side effects and adverse consequences.
Adverse consequences.
That’s how they had described it in the report. They hadn’t given him a copy. He’d stolen one.
And when they fully realized what they had created? How adverse the truly adverse could be?
He focused on the road up ahead. His short-term goal was to relocate somewhere. He couldn’t go back to the Grunt, but he had some money.
The next moment he had to pull off the road, slam the car into park, bend over the steering wheel, and throw up.
The pain seared through every one of his limbs. If ten was the top of the normal pain scale, this was a hundred.
Or a thousand.
Over the first twenty years it had happened only once a year.
When he’d been in prison over the last ten years the frequency had increased to once every six months.
But the thing was, the last time it had happened was less than a month ago. He’d been sitting in his cell staring at the wall. He didn’t know what time it was, only that it was somewhere in the stretch between late at night and the wavering darkness right before the dawn. It had taken all of his immense strength and self-control not to scream out loud.
He had gripped the bars of his cell and actually felt the metal begin to move a bit in his hands. He had immediately released them because the last thing he needed was the guards seeing that he was strong enough to actually damage the steel bars of his cage.
He had thrown himself down on the floor, gripped the concrete foundation that was his bed with a thin mattress thrown on top, and held on for dear life, his body curling into a fetal position in his silent agony.
He had emerged from that episode with every nerve in his body feeling like it was on fire.
Rogers did not feel pain. The thing in his head had taken care of that.
But this, this was beyond pain.
And he felt everything about it.
Ten minutes passed as his body convulsed without ceasing. Finally, he sat up and discovered that he had cracked the steering wheel in his hands.
He slumped back against the seat, his lungs heaving as he struggled to regain some sense of composure. But all the while he was thinking of only one thing.
Less than a month!
It had happened again in less than a month.
From year intervals, to six-month intervals, to less than thirty days.
What next? Weekly? Daily?
He touched his carotid and felt the blood racing through the vessel at a potentially lethal clip. He breathed in and out, deep, calming, settling.
Finally, he started to come out of it, his physiology going back to normal, or as normal as things got inside his skin.
He put the van in gear and awkwardly steered with the broken wheel. He would have to get some duct tape and fix that. There was some in the back of the van.
As he drove, his mind settled on another report, again one that he was not supposed to read but had. One line in particular had stood out to him.
The latest metrics strongly indicate that the underlying infrastructure does not appear to be sustainable long-term in a humanoid environment due to chemical, physiological, and biological incompatibilities.
Underlying infrastructure?
Sustainable in a humanoid environment?
Due to…?
“Fuck!”
He pulled off the road again and just sat there staring at his hands.
Infrastructure.
They were part of that.
He touched his arms and legs.
Them too.
His head.
Yep.
He knew exactly what that line of the report meant.
He was dying. It had been thirty years and the time was coming. Everything was accelerating. The piper needed to be paid. And he was the only one who could do it.
He was the dark side of Superman.
And his kryptonite was right inside him.
My kryptonite is me.
They had designed him to eventually detonate, spontaneously combust, fall apart, wither and dissolve. He didn’t know what it exactly would entail. And really didn’t give a shit.
The result is the same.
No more Paul Rogers.
It will be the end of me.
When the hand touched his shoulder he whirled and his fingers seized around the person’s neck.
It was Davis.
Rogers had rarely been more stunned in his life. Then he
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